by Karen Weintraub, Special for USA TODAY

by Karen Weintraub, Special for USA TODAY

For 70 years, Francis Holland wondered what had happened to his big brother.

Every night over those same 70 years, John Holland prayed for his missing brother, whom everyone called Frank. He taught his five children to do the same.

The brothers searched for each other a few times over the years, without success.

But nine days ago, they reunited for the first time in all those decades - a tearful reunion made possible by a serendipitous conversation at a hospital and the resourcefulness of a lab assistant who was moved to help.

Frank, now 83 and living in California, went to Kaiser Permanente San Rafael this spring to have cancerous skin cells removed from his nose.

The nurse, Maryanne Smith, was sweet and chatty. Frank confided that his wife had died in 2006 and they had no children. But he once had a brother, he told her, wondering aloud whether the boy he knew as Junior was still alive.

The nurse insisted he meet a lab assistant, Gabrielle Albrecht, who worked down the hall and who had once been a private investigator.

"I felt sad for him," says Albrecht. "He kept saying he's all alone. Most of his friends had passed on."

She did some Google searches and came up with a few options. When she had narrowed down the possibilities, she picked up the phone.

The first six calls she made were dead ends.

Then, she tried a John Holland III in Chattanooga, Tenn.

"I'm Gabi," she remembers saying. "I'm calling from California. Frank is looking for his brother."

John III, John Holland's son, grilled her to make sure she wasn't a thief. "Where was my father born? My uncle? What was the name of the orphanage they both lived in when they were young? Who took Frank from the orphanage?"

When Albrecht got the answers right, he said he was stunned.

"Oh my God, you found my long-lost uncle Frank," she remembers him answering.

Fifteen minutes later, Frank dialed a cellphone number in Tennessee, and John III passed the phone to his dad, John Junior. "Junior is this you?" Frank asked three times. "Is this Francis?" John answered when he finally understood the voice on the other end.

Both men wept.

After long conversations and a scramble of logistics, a terrified Frank Holland boarded an airplane for the first time ever without his wife, and flew east.

When he arrived at the Holland house in Chattanooga a little more than a week ago, he found Junior asleep in a chair - like him, a very early sleeper and riser. "Junior are you awake?" Frank said quietly a few times.

When the older brother awoke, he pulled his baby brother into a tearful embrace. They stayed that way for about 20 minutes, hugging and crying, John III said.

The two boys were born 14 months apart during the Depression. Their father traveled the country looking for work, and their parents' marriage had its struggles, Frank remembers, skipping over details.

Their mother ended up abandoning Frank, then 6, with a babysitter who turned him over to an orphanage. Their father eventually tracked him down and had him moved to the Belmont Children's Home in Ohio, where John Junior was living.

Reunited, the boys were each other's only family for seven years. Then an aunt came for Frank. Junior spent the rest of his childhood in the home, leaving when he turned 18 to join the service.

John III said he's never laughed as hard or had as much fun as he did the other night, playing cards and a trivia game with his only living uncle.

"It was an uplifting blessing when we really needed it," said John III, whose wife was recently diagnosed with cancer just as he was finishing up his own chemotherapy.

The family is celebrating in a handful of cabins in the resort town of Pigeon Forge, staying up way past the brothers' normal bedtimes to swap stories and memories. Frank has better recall for the names of their teachers and peers at the Children's Home. John, whose children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have joined the family gathering, remembers more details about their father.

Friday night, the group shared grilled cheese and tomatoes, because John Junior won't eat meat on Fridays; Saturday's menu was spaghetti, though the only Italians in the family were on John's wife's side.

Frank, the more talkative of the brothers, said he couldn't be more thrilled with the reunion. "I not only found my brother, I found a whole new family," he said, as a nephew held his hand to calm his nerves.

"I don't think we could ever really give up" looking for each other, Frank said. "You want to give up but you can't."